Home » Sacramental Universe

Category: Sacramental Universe

Navigating the Narrows: A Lenten Metaphor

My grandfather’s cottage sits atop an outcrop of Canadian Shield granite in southeastern Ontario. There is no road access. It is a journey of two lakes, and between the lakes lies “the narrows”.

As kids we’d pile into his motorboat at the landing, a weekend worth of groceries packed around us. Poppa would fire up the engine, adjust the throttle, and we’d roar down the first lake, aptly called Long. We’d lean into the spray as the boat raced between towering cliffs of pink-grey granite, high-soaring turkey vultures overhead.

The shoreline tapers at the end of Long Lake and an abandoned beaver dam marks the point of transition into the shallow channel between lakes. The immediate threat was always the fleshy stalks and feathery fronds of aquatic plants entangling the engine’s propellers. Poppa would cut the engine and tilt the motor out of the water.

We’d enter the narrows in silence.

It was we grandkids’ job to keep a lookout for rock shelves and boulder piles while Poppa navigated the danger by poling our way along with an old canoe paddle. Glacial debris from an ice age ago lying submerged just below the water line could damage the underside of the boat.

I’d lean over the side and let my finger cut a “v” in the water, becoming alert in the low light and quiet to this netherworld overhung with fallen birch limbs, shorelines tangled with wild blueberry and poison ivy, frog noses just above the water line, basking turtles, water striders dimpling the glassy surface, the slime green glint of rock bass in the muddy depths below, and everywhere the swampy smell of decomposing matter.

Then suddenly we were through. The bottom would drop away beneath us, bright sun bounce off the waves, and the sky open out onto the wide expanse of Loucks Lake. Poppa would again fire up the engine and off we’d shoot across the bay.

On the far shore sat the cottage, majestic on its perch amidst the pines, a world out of time. Within minutes we’d be diving from the weathered dock and eating baloney sandwiches to our childhood heart’s content.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of a season marking Jesus’ passage through the harrowing narrows of death (and our fear of it), to fullness of life on the other side. He invites us to follow.

This year as I take up the seasonal invitation, I’m reminded of all I learned about navigating life’s narrows over fifty years ago from a small passageway between two lakes in the Kawartha Highlands: slow down, pull up the motor, proceed in silence, watch out for hazards, expect fecundity amidst the decay, travel with others, and most of all, anticipate the deeper magic hidden from view that awaits on the other side.

When Love Trumps Legacy: A Daughter-Father Pandemic Story

But soon we shall die and all memory of the five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough, all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

– Thornton Wilder,  The Bridge of San Luis Rey

 

Much is made these days of parents who keep their children trapped in molds that have more to do with the needs and ambitions of the parents than with those of the child. This is that story, only in reverse. 

It has taken a lifetime, and a pandemic, for me to learn to love my dad for the man that he is and not for the man I’ve imagined or needed him to be.

Growing up everything Dad did seemed larger than life.  I all but worshipped him. Where it began I can’t say. I’m no psychologist.

 

The Stoplog cabin in the North Kawarthas.

Maybe it was with the Thoreau-inspired cabin he built with Mom in the backwoods of Ontario while I was still in diapers. (Typical to how my parents operated they prioritized the view over the more practical matter of access to water and to this day you have to climb down a steep ledge and whack through brush to get a bucket of water for cooking and washing.) 

 

Or maybe it was the teaching role Dad assumed at a secondary school in the Kikuyu highlands in central Kenya when I was only five.  We arrived in the port of Mombasa after a 22-day ocean voyage around the Cape, a part of the so-called “new wave” of nation-building missionaries, energized by the spirit of harambee in post-colonial Africa.  

 

Dad giving me the workings over, “to remove all the bad spots.”

Maybe it was the simple things like Dad going out every morning to milk his cow in the roshishio (rolling mist) behind our little stone house, or the character-rich stories of his childhood on the Bullock farm at Young’s Point in some far-off place called Ontario, or the swirls of smoke from his pipe and lingering smell of Old Port tobacco in the air, or Dad’s weekly ritual of giving me and my three brothers “the workings over”: deep muscle tickles, wrestling locks, bear hugs and whisker rubs that left us breathless with laughter, squealing, and begging for mercy. 

 

Maybe it was Dad’s meal time prayers, full of grounding refrains and pauses in all the right places: “Thank you for your blessings.” “Teach us to love.” “Forgive us our sins.”  

 

Or maybe it was the tidy stack of books to the side of his desk that always included a New York Times bestselling novel, a tome on world history or cultural anthropology, a classic of English (often Canadian) literature, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. 

 

Of course it could have been the move to the deserts of Northeast Province when I was twelve and Dad became the founding director of the Garissa Community Services Centre:

Me with my parents and three brothers outside our home in Garissa.

a revolutionary experiment in intertribal and interfaith communal living where  Kikuyus and Somalis, Muslims and Christians, Canadians and Africans committed to a simple way of life – living in thatched huts, eating together, praying together, and after the evening meal, laying outside on straw mats to count slow-moving satellites and identify constellations in a sky dense with stars together. 

 

Perhaps the parent-worship (Is there a term for this condition?) began with Dad’s seemingly endless capacity for new initiatives to improve the quality of life for the poorest of the poor: his province-wide program to eradicate tuberculosis among the nomadic Somali, his partnering with World Vision to pay the school fees of thousands of Somali children, his irrigation projects that defied the odds for farming the desert by pumping water up from the Tana River, his dream of a House of Prayer to be shared by Muslims and Christians with a resource library to mitigate stereotypes and counter centuries of Christian-Muslim antagonism and bloodshed.  

 

Dad in his Somali wrap and sandals giving a tour of the irrigation project on the Tana River.

 

Or maybe it had something to do with Dad’s height and the way he walked across the desert sand in his ma’awis (traditional Somali wrap) and sandals.  He was easy to spot and everywhere Dad went bystanders and children stopped and turned, calling out his Somali name: “Ali Dheri, Ali Dheri” (literally Tall Ali). 

 

All I know is that by the time I left Africa in 1982 to start my undergrad at Trent University I found myself the daughter of a living legend. This was a huge source of motivation and pride for me as I ventured into my early adult years. I strove to live a life as large as his had been. 

 

Then, only six years later, abruptly and without warning (for reasons outside the scope of this narrative), my parents left Africa and returned to restart their lives in Canada.

 

And almost immediately the myth of Ronald Ward began to unravel.

 

Of course I didn’t notice at first. The unravelling happened slowly and over time, and besides I had my head buried deep in my own life on the other side of the country. 

 

Nor was it a case of Dad not finding meaningful work back in the land of his birth. Indeed, he was as innovative as ever in reimagining his life back in Canada. But it was never quite the same. 

 

Dad in his broom closet of an office trying to bridge Toronto churches and the Somali diaspora.

First he tried to interest the Toronto churches in the Somali diaspora at their doorstep but the results were meagre, the divide too great.

 

He shifted his focus to peace work in the Horn of Africa and initiated negotiations between guerrilla insurgents, church organizations, and embassy staff. But peace work is notoriously difficult and he didn’t have the diplomatic credentials to make a lasting impact. 

 

Meanwhile back in Northeast Kenya, the interfaith community that he had established, and that was to be the breakthrough in Muslim/Christian relations, split down tribal and religious fault lines and disbanded. When I took my two young children and husband to Garissa in 2005 all that was left to show of my childhood home was a cement pad half-hidden by drifting sand.

 

Dad’s final initiative was to invest in a herd of thirty-five camels. He rallied stakeholders in Canada to back his vision for a dairy transporting anogel (camel milk) from Northeast Kenya to the growing population of Somalis in Montreal, Toronto, and Edmonton. But Dad was in over his head. The bureaucracy imposed by Agriculture Canada was confounding and his camels succumbed to famine and disease. In a single season he lost the whole herd. The dairy never materialized.

Dad with a newborn in the camel herd he sponsored.

All Is Vanity

Shortly after that  Dad woke up one day and said “I’m done”, and just like that he was retired. When we visited that summer he was in a state of profound discouragement and spoke openly about failure. Vanity, vanity. All is vanity,” he said on more than one occasion, and took to quoting William Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair. 

 

Instead of letting Dad grieve his losses or, more to the point, instead of grieving them myself I pushed back. “There are other ways to measure success, Dad,” I’d say, trying to get the narrative back on track. My own kids were young then, listening on. I didn’t want them to experience their grandfather as a defeated old man.  

 

And thus began my self-imposed and exhausting midlife work of shoring up Dad’s legacy which, possessively, I felt belonged as much to the next generations as to him.  The legacy wasn’t his to squander. All our lives were tied up with it. It needed to be safe-guarded.

 

The next dimension of Dad’s life to start crumbling was his health. Radiation treatments for prostate cancer destroyed his thighs and the man who had once walked-with-camels now needed help standing up and sitting down. I ordered handle bars for the toilet and became a ready expert at wiping urine from the bathroom floor when we would visit from Vancouver. I couldn’t bear to see my kids plugging their noses behind their grandfather’s back.

 

Next it was the breakup of his marriage. Mom moved to Toronto to liberate herself from the patriarchy and into life on her own terms, and Dad was left alone rambling around in the Anchorage, our heritage home on the Otonabee River. This shook the legacy to its very foundations.  I became skilled at finding euphemisms for the word “divorce” when answering my kids questions about why their grandparents weren’t together anymore: “Oh, they just have different interests.” etc.

The view from the deck outside Dad’s second floor office window at the Anchorage.

When Dad took to drinking an extra glass of sherry in the evenings I became quite the expert at hiding the empties before the children could see them, and when he took to smoking a hookah pipe I was right there to clean up the ash trays and deodorize the sickly-smelling air in his second floor office. Even the stories Dad would tell the kids about Africa sounded eccentric. Unattached to anything real. I found our holiday time in Ontario exhausting. I was in a state of perpetual damage control. 

 

One day Dad phoned to tell me that his doctor had given him “a few years at most”.  I mention this because I distinctly remember the sense of relief I felt.  Maybe death was the one thing that would keep him from driving his life any further into the ground. Maybe a well-attended funeral service with all the right anecdotes could salvage the vestiges of his former glory. Maybe there was still time for the myth of Ron Ward to be salvaged.  

 

But the doctor had it wrong. Dad lived on, and the losses continued.

 

After Mom’s departure Dad was unable to cover the re-mortgage payments on the Anchorage and in the summer of 2015, the year I turned 50, our family home was sold.  My kids and husband came out from Vancouver to help with the move, carrying boxes of Dad’s things across the village to a rundown, two-bedroom on Strickland St. The shame of it hung in the air and I made sure there was no opportunity for anyone to speak of it. Not in front of the children. I kept everything upbeat. 

 

Abigail and Oliver at the barn behind the Anchorage, August 2015.

 

When we said good-bye the end of that summer I remember thinking how like a stranger the old man sitting alone in his wing-backed chair was to me.  For the next five years contact with Dad was minimal, reduced to weekly (if that) phone calls across the country. My kids had entered their teen years and with camps and entry-level jobs their summers were spoken for.  Their memory of their grandfather was fading.  

 

Then came the pandemic and the phone call late on the morning of November 27, 2020: Dad had suffered a stroke. With hospital wards at capacity and long-term care homes in crisis, options for the 24/7 supervision he needed were limited. Before I got off the phone I knew that I would go to Lakefield and care for Dad myself. 

 

The next day I flew across the country and before falling into an exhausted sleep on the couch in Dad’s spare room googled “how to change a catheter”. 

 

I was awakened in the night by Dad, disoriented and tottery, his tall frame filling the doorway.  I scrambled to steady him and discovered his long-john underwear was soaked through, cold and clammy on his skin. I hadn’t set the catheter properly.  I helped him pull his long-sleeved shirt over his head then had him balance himself on the back of a chair while I carefully pulled the bottoms over the tubing down the legs. At the end I was on my knees coaching him on how to lift his heavy feet, one at a time, out of each leg hole.

 

There were no scripted-for-TV lines, no heroic moments to recount at a funeral. Just Dad standing there, naked and shivering, and me on the ground with his urine-soaked clothing.  Outside the window light on snow cast a glow across his face and I saw that his cheeks were wet with tears.

 

“It’s okay, Dad. I’m right here, Dad. I won’t leave you.” 

 

I got him into dry sleepwear, changed his sheets, and settled him back into bed. When he was asleep I pulled out my laptop again and googled “how to give an old man a sponge bath”

 

And thus began our daily routine:

Dad settled in his wing-backed chair.

Me preparing a steaming basin of water and bathing Dad before he got out of bed every morning;

Him getting settled into his wing-backed chair for the day then combing his hair; 

Me cooking eggs and mashed potatoes and other simple salt and pepper seasoned meals;

Him sitting in his wing-backed chair, nodding in and out of sleep;

Me emptying his catheter every few hours; 

Him shuffling up and down the hall with his walker for daily exercise; 

Me tucking him into bed and turning out his light at night;

Him taking my hand and giving it a squeeze.

 

As Dad’s speech and general orientation returned we added looking-through-boxes-of-family-archives to our daily routine.  I laid the eras of our life as a family on the floor in front of him and together we worked our way through them all, acknowledging the accomplishments that stood for a time then faded away, mulling over events out of our control, marvelling at moments of beauty and goodness and, above all, pondering the miracle of family and friendships and the gift of life weaving its way through everything.

 

Nothing was off the table.  We spoke of it all. And drank coffee. And watched the American election and NHL hockey games with no spectators in the stands. I kept my arm through Dad’s and felt a tenderness and love for him like I had never known before.  Echoes of long ago prayers hung in the air:  “Thank you for your blessings.” “Teach us to love.” “Forgive us our sins.”

 

Then came the phone call saying a place had opened up for Dad in long-term care. I was shocked. I hadn’t expected him to move up the waitlists this quickly. I had thought we’d have months together yet. We had been given twenty-four hours to decide. After a call with my brothers I knew it was the care Dad needed. 

Dad’s window at the Lakefield Extendicare.

 

I sobbed the day we moved him from his Strickland St. apartment to his new room in long-term care. With COVID-19 restrictions in place we weren’t allowed inside. The intake nurse dressed Dad in full PPE at the entrance and led him away down a hall painted pastel yellow.  

 

My kids flew out from Vancouver to help me pack up their grandfather’s apartment. 

 

Abigail and Oliver at the Sweeting Farm where their grandfather spent his summers as a child.

I assumed the role of family storyteller and took them on driving tours of Dad’s childhood haunts: the Bullock farm in Young’s Point, the Sweeting Farm on the 10th line of Smith Township, 622 Donegal St. in Peterborough where Dad had lived with his Aunt Gertie during WW II. I knew Dad would want his grandchildren to know about these places.

 

After lunch the three of us walked through the snow-covered village and over the bridge to Dad’s window at the back of the Lakefield Extendicare. I let the kids go ahead so that they could have time with their grandfather on their own. The gap in the window was only six-inches wide and icicles hung menacingly off the eavestrough above. Still I heard the laughter and the easy banter and witnessed the hands to the heart and other signs of deep affection that passed between them. 

 

Oliver and Abigail visiting with their grandfather outside his window at Lakefield Extendicare.

 

And as I watched my near-grown children interact with Dad it occurred to me that for the first time in their lives they were encountering their grandfather for who he was, not for who I wanted them to imagine him to be. 

 

One of my lifelong mentors, Franciscan priest Richard Rohr says that “Love is the attraction of all things toward all things, a universal language and underlying energy that keeps showing itself despite our best efforts to resist it.” 

 

There are probably as many ways to resist love as there are people on this planet. We all have our defences, hidden or otherwise. I’m grateful love got past mine. There are few freedoms like the freedom of no longer having to protect yourself from the journey your heart longs to take you on.

 

Dad from the other side of his window at Lakefield Extendicare.

 

Oliver at the dairy farm.

The Milkmaid’s Tale

Pif’s in labour.

The pre-dawn text lights up our shoebox of a bedroom. I roll off the side of the bed so as not to wake my husband, grab my work clothes from a hook on the back of the door and get dressed in the living room to the light of the Christmas tree.

Let it be a girl. Please let it be a girl.

Thankfully science is on side. The genetic engineering seems to be working. Almost all live births now are girls. If it’s a boy we’ll send notice and the buyers will come to take him away.

My face looks back at me out the living room window, superimposed over the lights of Vancouver’s distant downtown. I use the reflection to pin back my bangs and notice my car at street level below entombed in a layer of ice.

Crap.

The universe maintains its indifference and I begin rummaging around the living room for a makeshift ice scraper.

People often ask how we can be so cruel as to send the boys away. I explain that Hammingview is a females-only world. “Theoretically we could sustain ourselves for a hundred years without a male in sight.” The next line of scrutiny is predictable and I try not to sound callous. “Sperm is stored in the deep freeze. It has no expiry date.”

So if Pif’s firstborn is a male I’ll do what I do every time a boy is born at Hammingview- I’ll rub my thumb over his cheek while he chugs down a bottle of colostrum, his eyes rolling to the back of his head with pleasure. Then I’ll step to the side when they come for him and remain willfully ignorant of how he meets his end.

People persist. They want to know if the mothers object when their newborns are taken. “Some do”.  We endure them crying out as we work. But most are conditioned to look the other way, their eyes large and silent, revealing nothing.

I circumvent further interrogation by redirecting focus to the Hammingview nursery. “A room chock-a-block full of baby girl cuteness,” I gush. “It’s hard to keep track of whose daughter is whose.”

The first time I walked through the nursery my eyes smarted. Yvonne was touched by my entry-level sentimentality. Hammingview 101. Then she hastened to warn me not to get over-attached. “They don’t all make it,” she said with feigned objectivity.

Within 24 hours I was over-attached.  It’s a mandatory pitfall for novices at Hammingview. A rite-of-passage for the uninitiated, if you will.

The newborn responsible for breaching the low-lying defences of my heart arrived into this world before the sun was up on January 6. I named her for the day on the Christian calendar when the three kings were said to have visited the Christ Child: Epiphany.

Pif for short.

The bond between Pif and me developed on the side like a secret between friends. She’d await my arrival each day and when Yvonne wasn’t looking I’d spoil her with cuddles, warmed-up milk, and extra rations of cereal. But most of all Epiphany loved it when I sang her dredged up and half-remembered folksongs from my childhood though I’d be careful to stop short of the end verses when things take a turn for the worst. Like when my darling Clementine drowns in a vat of brine down in verse six:

Ruby lips above the water, blowing bubbles soft and fine.

But alas, I was no swimmer, so I lost my Clementine.

While my attachment to Pif deepened so did a growing unease that I was setting her above the rule of law at Hammingview. “She’s got attitude alright,” a colleague offered when I asked. At Hammingview “attitude” is code for trouble. So as Pif and her cohort turned the corner on adolescence and prepared to move in with the other Hammingview teenagers I decided to make the break. There was no final good-bye. I simply didn’t show up for work the day of the move. Epiphany had come of age. This would be a new chapter in her life.

“Mom?”

I start. It’s Oliver standing in the hallway, his pyjama bottoms hanging off his lanky 16-year-old waist.

When I tell him about the text his eyebrows lift. He knows what Pif means to me.

Oliver was alarmed when he first heard that I had a job at Hammingview. Hires from the outside are rare for the industry. I had always worked in the non-profit sector with organizations designed to set society’s hard-done-by back on their feet. When burnout set in I craved manual labour that paid by the hour, gave me back my weekends, and asked little of my heart.

Which is how I mustered the courage to walk up the drive of Hammingview Farms unannounced and inquire about employment. Standing against a bleak November sky Yvonne looked at me suspiciously. “You aren’t one of those activists with a camera hidden inside your coat, are you?” The question confused me.  I thought I was applying to work in the most benevolent industry known to humankind.

My naivety served me well. Yvonne offered me a job on the spot and in keeping with expectations my first few days at Hammingview were exhilarating. The primal connection with this improbable community of lactating mothers was immediate and all in the context of the rhythmic pulsing of the pumps and the steaming-warm sloshing of life’s most sustaining miracle: milk. It had been years since I had weaned Oliver yet the travail of breastfeeding came back to me as though it were yesterday: the involuntary let-down, the frustrations with latching, the cracked and bleeding nipples that never get a break, the ever-lurking risk of mastitis, the engorged mammary glands when milking is delayed, hard as rocks and painful as hell.

“That industrial grade spatula might work,” Oliver proposes as a solution to my ice-removal conundrum before disappearing into the bathroom.

When he was four a Mexican playmate convinced him to set a basin of water and a shoe outside the back door on the eve of Epiphany. “While you are sleeping the Three Kings will stop by your house to give their camels a drink,” insisted his young friend. The next morning Oliver awoke to a tipped and emptied water basin and a shoe spilling with candy. He stood silent for a long time looking out through the slats on our back porch pondering all that had transpired in the darkness on our soggy, East Van lawn.

When he emerges from the bathroom he offers to scrape the car off for me.

“I’ve got it, buddy. You go back to bed.”

For months my decision to cut ties with Epiphany seemed sound. I stuck to the discipline of it, attending to the flow of new arrivals into the nursery as a way of filling the space made empty by Pif’s departure.

Then mid-morning on no-day-in-particular my resolve came up short. This was all the excuse I needed to abandon whatever it was I was doing in the nursery and go in search of her.  She wasn’t difficult to find, lying on the grass with a few friends, her black and white coat glinting in the early summer sun. It occurred to me then how clueless she was about what lay ahead and how these would be the most carefree days of her life at Hammingview. It didn’t seem right to interfere. I turned my back and walked away, glancing over my shoulder for one final look, and there she was!  Standing apart from the others, looking at me.

“Piffy?”

My half-whisper anticipated a well-deserved snub.

Instead Epiphany tossed her head and ran at me with such force I had no time to brace myself for the 700-lb display of adolescent affection. I was knocked to the ground on contact. Laughing I got to my knees and, just like in the movies, threw my arms around her neck promising never to abandon her again.

I wasn’t present when she was inseminated and only learned of her pregnancy when I saw her name on the board. It was in a list with others under the word “confirmed”. While this news meant that her unstructured days of running in a pack and watching the fields turn colour were at an end it also, and more importantly, meant she’d be allowed to stay on at Hammingview. At least for now. Some of the girls “don’t take”. Their names appear on the board under the word “open”. If too many open months pass their names are erased and that’s the last we see of them.

Oliver watches me pull on my boots.

“You okay?” he asks. He knows what’s at stake. 

Hammingview stories are dinner fare at our house. He’s well acquainted with the shortlist of potential outcomes, each with its own variation on misfortune.

There’s Tilly whose daughter was stillborn and Jewel whose wasn’t. Yet where Tilly let milk flow like a tributary of the Fraser River in spring, Jewel wouldn’t relinquish an ounce. No amount of pleading could switch on the oxytocin release mechanism in her brain. A week later the count was out and I knew Jewel had been taken.

Agnes stories are a favourite. I refer to her fondly as the Mother Superior for having given a lifetime of service. Her badge of honour is a limp. It won’t be long before the truck comes for Agnes.

Then there is Dori. Oliver knows it would please me if Pif had even an ounce of Dori’s spunk. She is legend at Hammingview for staging a revolt. It seems she had no intention of being impregnated a second time. Alerted by the syringe and latex gloves neatly laid out on the dispensary table she made a spontaneous break for freedom that left an air gate dangling by a hinge. We found her later that morning at the neighbours’ and had her home by lunch. The next day Dori was “done” and now her belly, like a ripening sadness, grows fuller and heavier by the day.

  “Yah. I’m okay.” I give Oliver a muted smile. “Thanks for asking.”

On my way to the door I stop on impulse at the alcove where our nativity scene is displayed through the Christmas season. The god-baby looks placidly out at the world from his fabled bed of straw.

“You shouldn’t have come,“ I say sullenly. “This world doesn’t do well with ambiguity.”

Oliver heeds my dip into despair before stepping over by my side. Then, with the deliberation of a chess master, he picks up the lone cow resting outside of the stable behind two sheep, removes the three kings from their place at the centre of the action, and sets the broad-faced matron-of-milking-mothers down in the coveted spot beside the manger within reach of the infant’s outstretched hand.

He holds the cow’s back for a moment as though to check for unforeseen danger. Then, releasing his fingers from the game board, he looks me in the eyes and punctuates the move with a grin.

So this is what I want to know. Why does my response to this 16-year old son of mine fall half-a-life time short of what’s in my heart? Why, when what I want is to give him one of those bear hugs that used to leave him laughing and gasping for mercy as a child; why, when what I want is to find just the right words to thank him for accepting me for the off-script mom that I am; why, when what I want is to let him know how fiercely I love him, do I manage nothing more than to hold up the spatula between us.

It’s not the response of my heart but when he gives the spatula the high five I’m looking for I know it’s response enough. I open the door and head outside into the frosty darkness.

* Story longlisted for CBC’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize

Statement Made to Judge Affleck of the Supreme Court of British Columbia Three Months After My Arrest at the Gates of Kinder Morgan for Protesting the Tripling of the Trans Mountain Pipeline

Your Honour, I want to tell you about the day in March that I stood at the gates outside of Kinder Morgan attempting, as the evidence has accurately established, to block access to the construction of a pipeline that I oppose. 

The police records and the Crown’s argument tell one side of the story. I’m grateful for your willingness to hear the other.

To be honest I had rather heroic ideas about my actions. I have a 15 year-old son, Oliver, and a 17 year-old daughter, Abigail, and they had become discouraged about their future. It seemed that every day on the news there was another development (You know the headlines): the collapse of the bee population worldwide, the demise of the Great Barrier Reef, the breaking up of the polar ice caps, extreme weather destroying homes and neighbourhoods, the anticipated extinction of orangutangs within the next 10 years. And so on.

There are many things a parent can endure, as I’m sure you can appreciate your Honour, but watching your kids lose hope is not one of them.

So, simply put, rather than sit passively by I decided I would do something to empower them  to reclaim their future. I had read recently that the civil disobedience toolkit has been lost to a whole generation in the west where hard-won liberties are now so taken for granted we naively presume right will prevail.  So I set out the morning of March 24 to demonstrate non-violent protest in action (though, truth be told, I hardly knew what I was doing myself.)   

Yet isn’t it the way with life: just when you think you are way out in the lead you discover that there are others with a knowledge and experience base who have been there long (sometimes centuries!)  before you ever appeared on the scene.

We were a big group that day (50 or 60 I believe). It was biting cold and then it started to snow: huge flakes, the size of saucers (you’ve probably seen the footage). The snow caked on our heads and soaked through our clothes to the bone. No one had come dressed for snow.

And that’s when a man by the name of Stacey, a self-identified Anishinaabe ally of the Tsleil Waututh, began walking back and forth in front of us in his toque and grey sweats and work boots, like an unlikely commander of a legion. And he started to play his drum for us and sing us the resistance songs of his people.  And when our teeth began to chatter he told us jokes and laughed with us. And when we could no longer feel our fingers and toes he walked among us passing out warm soup and bread.

And the day dragged on and as our spirits began to flag, an indigenous woman, whom I believe you have met, stood up on a ledge just to the right front of where I was. She needed a cane to balance her frail frame which was wracked by a lifetime of hardship that I’m sure I can’t begin to comprehend.  Yet with her free hand she held up an eagle feather high into the air above us.  I can’t tell you what she meant by this gesture but I can tell you how I experienced it: as an act of protection, as though to care for us and give us the strength we would need for the stand we were taking.

And when the police arrived, they positioned themselves in a line in front of us to begin their arrests. It was at this point that an indigenous man wearing a felt bowler hat stepped out from the crowd of supporters. I learned later that he is an artist and activist who goes by the name Ostwelve. And he planted himself eye-to-eye in front of each of the officers in turn and urged them to re-consider their options:  “History doesn’t have to unfold like this.” I overheard him implore. “None of us, not me, not you, has to follow the script life has handed us.”

As the hours passed I was worried about my daughter who had come to support me and as far as I knew was standing by herself lost in the crowd in the snow and the cold.  And I asked for news on her and word came back to me that she had been invited by the Tseleil Waututh youth leader, Cedar George to join a group of indigenous youth for a special youth-focused ceremony in the shelter and warmth of the Watch House.

And I thought “Who ARE these people?”   From what I know of the historic record all we’ve ever done is swindled, robed, bribed, and used whatever means available to us to take their land out from under them.

In the days following my arrest it became my quest to find an answer to this question. I went to the Tsleil Waututh camp by the Watch House on the soccer field to find out.

If you haven’t already done so I hope you get the chance to visit the Watch House, Your Honour.  I think you’ll be surprised as I was surprised to discover that this protest-based surveillance camp, before it is anything else, is a place for spiritual grounding.

The first thing you’ll be  invited to do on entering the camp is to offer prayer at the Sacred Fire. It’s an act that starts you down the road of reaffirming your connection to the Creator and to all living things (animate and inanimate alike). And the more time you spend at the camp the more you will remember what it means to put human relationships before personal acquisition and the health of the earth before material comforts.

I won’t take any more of your time, Judge Affleck.  My account has come full circle.  I crossed the injunction line not to bring discredit to the court but to bring hope to Abigail and Oliver. 

I believe we found the hope we were looking for though not as we expected.  It comes from the knowledge that at the forefront of the struggle there are indigenous leaders, not only here in our city, but across our country and around the world who understand  that caring for the earth is a sacred duty and comes at a great cost.

Regardless of the penalty you have assigned me today, my actions will have cost me little more than a sliver of my white privilege. In contrast the cost to the leaders I met on the mountain that day is incalculable. They have laid everything on the line for the sake of the struggle.  They are the true heroes.  It has  been an honour to stand with them.

Post script:  I pleaded guilty on June 26, 2018 and was sentenced to 25 hours community service.  The standoff on the mountain continues.  Click here to volunteer at the Watch House. 

Sign above the dish pit at the camp on Burnaby Mountain.